Clermont-Ferrand (AFP)
"This is my first sewing lesson!": At the Michelin factory in La Combaude, in Clermont-Ferrand, part of the workers are converted to the production of masks while others have had to go back to work. adapting to new measures against coronavirus.
The meeting room has become a sewing workshop. Bending over white tables arranged in a rectangle, around twenty employees discover how a sewing machine works, how to make a pattern or even how to fold a mask.
Michelin's objective is to eventually produce 400,000 pieces per week for health personnel and group employees.
Jérôme Berthier is more used to handling the tire cables than the fabric: this sector controller immediately volunteered to learn how to make masks. With an uncertain gesture, he tries to connect the elastic to the mask by actuating the pedal of his sewing machine.
"It is not easy at the start but it is a blow to take! It is my first lesson in sewing! We need masks, I find it logical to be voluntary", he explains, encouraged by its trainer, Barbara Konopka, herself a fitness instructor at Michelin, but who practices sewing on a personal basis.
On the lower floor, a dozen already operational employees work on aligned tables.
"This is the start of a new activity, we start mass production, first very manually, then we will automate all of this and we will have industrial production chains all over Europe and tomorrow all over the world ", assured the press Florent Menegaux, the president of Michelin who came to greet the employees on Friday.
"Innovation is the hallmark of Michelin, today it is fully expressed and the group will be able to overcome this crisis," he said.
Objective at La Combaude: 20,000 masks per day within two weeks and 150 operational employees.
- Unpublished stop -
After an unprecedented shutdown of more than two weeks - during the Second World War, only certain factories had been stopped - production gradually resumed in early April at Michelin, despite union reluctance.
"The generalized confinement caused a fairly brutal shutdown of all our activities, (...) we took advantage of this shutdown to define what were the security conditions which would allow us to restart," explained Mr. Menegaux.
"Michelin manufactures tires essential for safety vehicles, firefighters, ambulances, emergency vehicles" and "our activities are vital", he further justified.
Three French factories have partially restarted, including that of La Combaude which manufactures molds for tires. In the huge hall where gigantic pieces and molds are stored, some workers are busy.
Fifty or so have returned to the workshops, out of a workforce of 600. Volunteers only. The group's unions have obtained the guarantee that employees who do not wish to return to work could stay at home.
Draconian measures have been put in place: temperature measurement at the entrance to the building, hydroalcoholic gel and masks available in the workshops, minimum distance of two meters between each worker, disinfection of workstations every hour, etc.
An insufficient protocol in the eyes of some unions. "There is no such thing as zero risk, all the experts agree that the only way to fight this virus is to stay at home," says Jérôme Lorton (South), who is opposed to the recovery.
For him, all of Michelin's activities are not "in the public interest", while "all the sites are working on a reopening".
Mathieu Sol, operator, has worked for Michelin for 13 years. Alone in front of an imposing five-axis machining machine, he manufactures the parts that will constitute the tire molds: "We took over with a small team, that reduces the risks!", He assures.
"My machine is isolated so I don't see many people, that's also why I wanted to take over, but I'm lucky not to have children," he admits.
As of Monday, two new factories will restart in France, said Menegaux, without however specifying which ones.
© 2020 AFP